Noyade en magma

“… a thinking being is thrown, by accident or otherwise, into the heart of a star. Far from being instantaneously vaporized, he finds himself, after a stunningly hard first physical contact, tossed about by magmatic currents of phenomenal power, which drag him along towards the centre of the heavenly body. This is a place of strangeness, and odd relationships are established, maybe through a peculiar gift of musical mimetism with the cultural substratum of the drowning being. The trip to the centre carries on, and with the accumulation of tensions and pressure the acoustical curve slows down, softens, and darkens, now more related to the ambience of the abyss. The ending of the piece lets us catch a glimpse of the premise of mutual adaptation, and even the edgings of a dialogue between the drowned one and his star…”

[vii-09]

Noyade en magma [Drowning in Magma] was realized in stereo in May 2001 (the transfer to 7.1 was realized in January 2006) at the composer’s studio in Montréal and premiered — with Francis Dhomont at the desk — on 23 June 2006, during the 3rd Festival di Musica Acusmatica at the Tiscali Auditorium in Cagliari (Sardinia). In July 2008, the final versions (stereo and 5.1) went through minor revisions carefully supervised by Marcelle Deschênes.